Cat in Glass

by Nancy Etchemendy

  Finally I grab the sleeve of an efficient-looking middle-aged man as he rushes by. “Do you know where the ground-slick schedules are posted?” I ask.

  He frowns, indicates a tiny keyboard on the back of his hand, and says, “Get yourself a wristnet,” then hurries on.

  I stand there blinking and feeling stupid for a moment. The briefers told us there had been changes in the language. Mostly vocabulary, they said, and they went over a list of new words. But “wristnet” was not among them. I tighten my grip on the handle of my small, black duffel and continue wandering. The briefers also told us the easiest way to deal with time dislocation is to think of Earth as just another alien planet. At the time, I laughed aloud. Now I wish I could take their advice. My powers of self-deception are notoriously good, but even in this stinking terminal I have a terrible case of déjà vu and I can’t make myself believe the lie. Earth is not just another alien planet. It’s my home. And the people at the end of my journey are not just simple strangers. Once upon a time, they trusted me, and I deserted them.

  I sneak into a corner and break open another blissrock, glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one is watching. The briefers were careful to warn us about the various penalties for consumption of illegal substances Earthside. No one approves of blissbreathing; yet everybody does it. Especially lightbuckers.

  Eventually, I spy a set of small, deserted LCD screens with a list of ground-slick departures flashing across them in chartreuse letters. The next southbound slick leaves in an hour.

  I find a bench and rest on the edge of it for a minute or two, rubbing my thumb across the inlays of the Eridani bliss-box in my hip pocket. I take out the photograph and hold it in my hands like a talisman. I study Eugenia’s face. If Adam is still alive, he probably left the ranch long ago. Perhaps the adobe house has fallen to dust. Perhaps there is no one left who cares what I’ve done, or who remembers that we used to have family reunions on the last Sunday of each August. The thought at once encourages and saddens me.

  With a shiver, I get up to look for a ticket window. It takes less time to find than the schedule did. While I wait in line, a teenage girl with a small blue trapezoid painted on her forehead watches me curiously. At first I wonder why. Then I remember the shore leave blacks.

  After a while, she says, “Lightbucker, huh? How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five,” I say.

  “No. I mean in real actualness,” she says. She sticks something long and purple into her mouth and chews it loudly. It smells like garlic and artificial fruit.

  “I’m really twenty-five.” I stifle an urge to pull the smelly thing out of her mouth and throw it on the floor. The briefers tried to prepare us for as many changes in customs and styles as they could. But I can already see it was an impossible task.

  “No. I mean what is the truest longness of time since you were born?” she says, smacking her lips.

  I wrap my fingers around the blissbox in my pocket. I should be a good sport, laugh and tell her exactly what she wants to hear—that I was born eighty years ago, when people still hoped the Light Corps might turn things around for Earth, a long time before blue forehead trapezoids and purple garlic confections came into vogue. But I can’t seem to manage it.

  “Twenty-five years,” I repeat with a broad, stiff grin and turn to the ticket agent.

  I hand him my bioprotein card—a small, flat piece of transparent material which contains every bit of information known about me, or so the briefer said. The agent slips it into a slot in the counter, and when it pops out again, he hands it back to me.

  “Where’s my ticket?” I say.

  “You’re holding it,” he replies. “Next.” And he beckons to the girl with the blue trapezoid.

  “Uh … wait a minute. Where can I buy a newspaper?” It slips out before I remember how foolish it will sound.

  He steps back and squints at me. I watch his face change as my blacks register. “Peeeeesuz!” he says; it’s almost a whistle. “Maddleford, come here. Alwaysful wanting to see a lightbucker …”

  Maddleford is a man in his forties whose hair stands up like the fur on an angry dog’s back. He has on a jacket that looks like it’s made of gold spider webs.

  “Newspaper?” says the ticket agent. He is practically screaming with laughter.

  “See this?” says Maddleford, pointing to my card. “Take your biopro to an infodist and have it codified in the news slot. Then all you need to do is beam it on your reader.”

  I stand there for a moment before I realize my mouth is hanging open.

  “I’m next, lightfucker,” says the girl with the blue trapezoid. She joins the ticket agent, who is laughing even louder now.

  “Shuddup,” says Maddleford.

  I grab my duffel bag and walk across the depot, holding my chin as high as I can, wishing I could do something about my cheeks, which burn, and my hands, which shake as if I were truly ancient. Before long, I am running as fast as I can down the corridor toward the southbound ground-slick gate.

  I pause only a moment on the platform to wipe sweat from my eyes and try to regain my composure. Then I duck through one of the slick’s dented aluminum doors and find a seat beside a grimy window. I close my eyes, trying to appear cool and detached. I want to be the tough light-bucker on leave from the stars. I want to be the lean figure on the Saturday vidflicks Tim and I used to watch. But in the darkness behind my eyelids Adam appears. My son, twenty-two years older than I am, abandoned by a mother who wandered off in search of more compelling loves. I lurch forward in my seat, breathing fast, staring at nothing.

  From the row in front of mine a little boy gazes at me with his mouth open. He is clutching a stuffed replica of a Centauran silk-spinner.

  “Look, Mommy. A lightbucker!” His eyes are big, his voice shrill.

  In a sudden fit of shyness, he ducks. Peering at me from between the seat backs, he waves the stuffed spinner over his head. “Sssst ssssst,” he says. “I bet you’ve never seen one of these.”

  I smile, thinking of Adam. Was he ever like this? “Oh yes, I’ve seen one of those,” I say. “On Alpha Two. The real ones have bigger thoraxes, and they smell like a combination of skunks and rotten eggs.”

  “Really?” His wide-eyed face reappears above the seats, but only for a moment. I hear the sharp slap of flesh on flesh. “Ow!” he cries.

  Then a woman, probably his mother, whispers, “Stop that. It’s whippy. Lightbuckers are all brainbent. I don’t want you talking to her again.”

  I am left gazing at the empty seat backs, bitterness rising in the back of my throat. Brainbent. Freely I give myself to the stars. That is the oath of the lightbucker. Freely I afflict myself with the stigmata of temporal physics. Freely I lay down my humanness in return for the beauty of space. Don’t make me laugh.

  I run my fingers over the hip pocket of my blacks and the blissbox riding snugly there. I remember my first whiff of bliss, lying in Forrest’s arms, looking up at the desert stars of my home as if I had never seen them before. I am infinitely strong, I thought. And all the anger I felt at my circumstances—the death of my mother, the thankless toil of holding a job, keeping house for Father and Tim, and helping with the ranch—was replaced with soft melancholy. I understand, I thought. Finally I understand.

  Illusory or not, it’s a difficult state of mind to resist. I slip the box from my pocket, break open a rock, and inhale its contents.

  Almost immediately I hear polite words from the aisle. “Sorry to bother you, but …”

  The voice belongs to an immaculate attendant whose clothing, I suspect, is the same color the ground-slick’s seat upholstery was before it wore out. He’s younger than I am, barely out of his teens, but he places his hand on my shoulder like a favorite uncle giving wise advice. “Buckerfriend, bliss-breathing is antilawful here. Didn’t they tell you?”

  I regard him for a moment, hoping I will discover something useful about him from his face, his hands, the way he carries himself.
I wonder what he will do to me. “Sorry. I didn’t know. I won’t use any more of them.” The lie slips out smoothly.

  He smiles in a cordial, practiced way. “Thanks, bucker-friend. But same in same, I have to take them away.”

  All I can think of is the prospect of facing Adam without the help of bliss. I have a few extra rocks hidden in my duffel, but I’m not sure they’ll be enough to get me through. A tingle of panic buzzes upward from my groin. I feel the muscles in the back of my neck tighten. “What do you mean? They’re mine.”

  “It’s antilawful to possess them. Sorry,” he says.

  “Look. Just let me keep them. I’m not bothering anyone.”

  He turns and beckons to someone I can’t see. A larger attendant hurries down the aisle.

  “Please don’t,” I say, in as quiet a voice as I can manage. They pay no attention. The new arrival pries my fingers open and takes away the Eridani blissbox. I watch him touch it, hating him, feeling as if he were violating my own body. The other passengers whisper behind their hands.

  “The box isn’t yours. At least let me keep the box,” I say.

  He opens it, shakes the blissrocks into the palm of his hand, and pockets them. Smirking, he tosses the box to the first attendant, turns, and walks back the way he came. I pound the armrests softly with my palms, cursing the guilt that made me embark on this journey, wishing for the familiar comfort of unexplored planets.

  But a second later, I feel the initial tendrils of euphoria wrap around me as that last, expensive hit of bliss finally begins to take effect.

  I notice that the first attendant’s cheeks are red. An apologetic smile jerks across his face and disappears as he hands the empty box back to me. I’m fascinated by his teeth, which are horribly white. Briefly, I hope I have ruined his day. Then the main rush of bliss floods through me, the ground-slick shudders out of the station, and I realize my anger is not worth the energy it takes to sustain it.

  I close my eyes, enjoying the way a smile feels on my face. Of course everything will be fine. I picture myself scuffling through the dusty remains of the adobe ranch house. Nobody will be there. Least of all Adam. It hardly matters anyway.

  I imagine the earth without people. It would all be so much easier then. Sky. Continents. Mountains. Rocks. Maybe these are the things I have really come back for. Entities that change at a meaningful rate—not at all in a hundred human life spans. But in fact my mind is on people. Tim, my father, Adam, and especially Eugenia Miller, who was kind to me when no one else chose to be. I loved a lightbucker once. He said he would take me to the stars and grow old with me. I believed him. Exhausted, I doze.

  I dream of Forrest.

  On a warm, windy night he comes to the café where I work. We can see the stars through the dust, and he points out the ones he has been to. Over coffee, he watches me with his flame-blue eyes and tells me the story of his life. When I bring him his check, he lays the Eridani blissbox on the tray. I have never seen anything like it before. “Keep it,” he says. “Let me take you somewhere. I have no one. No one in all the world except you.” I imagine his home, a town in the north—the snow, the heavy gray sky, the streets filled with strangers. “Dead, or transformed by time, all of them,” he says.

  I hold the blissbox in the palm of my hand. It feels warm, as if it contains all the fire of the stars. The heat goes up my arm, down my spine in a shiver of longing, and I know nothing will ever be the same again.

  I struggle to stay in the warmth of this moment, but the dream fades into an old, familiar one. I am standing on the ramp of a Lux drive starship waiting for Forrest. I have just returned from the leave I took to bear our son; this ship is bound for Fomalhaut, and Forrest and I have both signed on for the run. I was to meet him here.

  Instead, it’s a cosmocop who meets me. Sadness clings to him like dust. I see it in the soft lines of his face, even on his boots and dark uniform. He holds something out to me. A padded envelope bearing the official insignia of the Light Corps.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he says. “The ensign was a good man. I knew him personally.”

  I stare down at the envelope, knowing what’s in it. A stilted letter about a loading accident on an asteroid. For a moment, I can’t breathe. Then the dream disappears, and there’s nothing left. Nothing left at all except blackness.

  When I awaken, we have already come far south, stopping at small places along the way no doubt, and are hurtling through the mountains. In a few minutes, we will reach Pactolus. I stare out the window, lost in a game of pretend. I’m sixteen years old. I’m riding in an automobile, and beside me sit Tim and my father. We’re on our way home to the Lost Cannon Ranch. I know these meadows, these granite cliffs. They will look the same forever. The stars are only a dream. There is no Adam. And relativity is an esoteric mind game played for amusement by certain academics.

  The fantasy abruptly disintegrates as the little boy I spoke to earlier begins to wail for unknown reasons.

  The question returns: What will I say to my son?

  The slick stops only a few seconds in Pactolus. I step onto the platform, the strap of my duffel bag twisted around my wrist so tightly it almost cuts off the circulation. There’s a slight rush of cool air as the train pulls away. Then I am alone.

  The Lost Cannon Ranch lies four miles from here, at the end of a dirt road. More precisely, if the Lost Cannon Ranch still exists, it lies four miles from here, and the road was dirt forty-seven years ago.

  I walk toward the tiny station house. The sun pours down from a fierce blue sky, baking everything—the wood, the rocks, the sagebrush, and especially me, in my impractical black uniform. Somehow, I had forgotten the magnitude of this dry heat. I loosen my collar.

  Inside the station, there’s an office with a counter and a window. A sign above it says Tickets and Information. The person inside does not look up when I speak.

  “I want to go out to the Lost Cannon. What’s the best way to get there?” I say, and then hold my breath.

  “Go down to Naylor’s and rent a sandscoot.”

  I start to breathe again, a little shakily. He recognizes the name. The ranch must still be there.

  “What’s a sandscoot?”

  Now he raises his head, frowning. I’m relieved to discover that he is a mere baby, a boy in his early twenties, far too young to be anyone I know.

  “Waddya mean, what’s a sandscoot?” he says. His speech patterns seem more familiar, less modern, than those I heard in the superterm. At least one thing remains unchanged. The mainstream of progress still takes a long time to touch a place as small as Pactolus.

  I stand in fidgety silence while he looks at me. I would like nothing better than to abandon this exchange and find a secluded place to do a blissrock.

  His expression goes from suspicion to excitement as he realizes I’m dressed in a bucker’s uniform. “Peesuz, you must be Annie Moffat!”

  “That’s right,” I say as he shakes my hand across the counter. “How did you know my name?”

  “Old Tim said to stay sharp for lightbuckers, because you might show for the reunion this year. They keep track of the ships. You’re famous around here, did you know that?” he says.

  “No.” Old Tim. Still alive. In a single sentence, the boy behind the counter has blasted away the possibility that nothing will happen. There will be no dusty ruins. The family will gather. And the last Sunday of August looms in my future as surely as tomorrow’s sunrise. I struggle to control the panic that rises inside me. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want Tim to be keeping track of the ships. I wish everyone had forgotten about me.

  The counter boy continues with horrible good cheer. “My name’s Jerry Blue. Pleased to meet you.” He flashes me a big, easy grin. “My granddad says you went to school with him.”

  Blue. I think I remember this alleged grandfather. A kid with big ears who had a black dog named Sandy. The storm of panic abates a little, and with it the itch for a blissrock. I return the boy
’s smile in spite of myself. I take a deep breath.

  “Tell me. What’s a sandscoot?” I say.

  “Well, it’s … peesuz, haven’t you ever seen a sand-scoot?”

  I shake my head again and lick salty sweat from my upper lip.

  “Naw, now that I think of it. Sandscoots have only been around since ’70. Peesuz. You’ve been gone a long time.”

  Oh no, I want to say. You just think I’ve been gone a long time. You’re crazy. It’s only been a year. “Sandscoot,” says Jerry Blue. “It’s a single-passenger wheel for rough terrain hopping.” He wrinkles his forehead. “I just thought of something, though. You got a VO permit?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I say. I hand him my biopro.

  “Two secs real time. I’ll find out.” He slides the card into the omnipresent slot in the counter and drums his fingers while he waits for information to appear on an LCD screen. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m saving up for a wristnet, but I don’t have it yet.” He taps the back of his hand like the man in the superterm who also talked of wristnets.

  My puzzlement must show, for he adds, as the LCD begins to glow with text, “You know about wristnets? It’s kind of … peesuz … hard to explain. Like having a computer link straight to your brain. It’s faster.”

  I try, without much success, to imagine what it would be like to have a computer link straight to my brain.

  Jerry Blue glances at the screen, hands the card back to me. “No vehicle operator’s permit. I didn’t think so. Naylor can’t rent you a sandscoot without one.”

  A new obstacle. From the beginning, this journey has been like trying to map a type-four planet. Maybe all these problems are fate’s way of telling me I shouldn’t be doing this. God, I need a blissrock. I fight the impulse to fling myself through the doorway and run northward along the ground-slick tracks until this place is invisible, not even a smudge on the horizon. I know it won’t work. Wherever I go, I carry Pactolus and the Lost Cannon and all their inhabitants inside me. The only way to escape is to face them.